Des clichés positifs se rapportant à la jeunesse, la fraîcheur est sans contexte la qualification la plus pertinente quand on avait écouté pour la première fois Window Shopper des Disconcerts. Formé il y a environ deux ans, ce trio démontre une maturité surprenante dans leur premier 7″ dont le guitariste a réalisé l’artwork très francisbaconnien et qui contient les prometteurs Human Figure In Motion ainsi que Chance Remark. Le Bar Cult s’est vu accorder leur premier entretien pour un webzine français.

Entretien en français sur notre MySpace.

Le Bar Cult. : Tonight you are supporting Neils Children. John Linger is the singer of the band. He produces and manages a recent created label A Structurally Sound Records. How did he discover you and make you part of this collective?
Disconcerts : Well, it happened really fast with Rick being rather cheeky in his antics and asked Neils Children if we could support them on one of their gigs and John just went ‘I’m really sorry but we haven’t got any gigs for you to play with us but I’ll produce your single if you want’ and while we were recording the next day just by ourselves, he came down to where we lived and recorded us. Then about a month later he just went ‘Can I be your manager?’ and we were like ‘Hats off’.

LBC. : Did you know him before?
Disconcerts : Never met before. We like Neils Children so we were quite happy about that.

LBC. : How do you feel about being one of the youngest band of the moment? Does it impact on your credibility as a professional band?
Disconcerts : [laughs] Your credibility doesn’t depend on your age. If you are playing nonsense, you are less credible but it isn’t linked with your age. The main thing is to play whatever you want and feel to play. Just do it! For music and not to have more groupies at your concert…

LBC. : You are not living in London but in Chichester (West Essex). Does this make you more different/original than the all so called fashion trend London bands? Does it give you a different approach maybe?
Disconcerts : I think it adds to the fact that it doesn’t. We do live quite far away – about three hours away – we don’t really have any people to influence us when we go out, like people asking you ‘Oh, have you heard this really good stuff?’. We sort of listen to whatever we want like. We like listening to loads of rap, drum ‘n bass , and reggae. We don’t feel embarrassed about what we’re influenced by. Around here, it seems like you’re almost pressured to say, well, I can’t like that, I’ve got to like this…

LBC. : How do you feel then about playing in London?
Disconcerts : Excited in a way and happy not to live there. We just come quickly for a gig. We don’t really know what’s going on, we are just coming and play, honestly.

LBC. : Is there a Chichester scene?
Disconcerts : No, nothing happens in Chichester. There was only one interesting band but it’s abandoned now. [laughs] In fact, we started that one so now we’ve like abandoned Chichester a bit because we had a falling out with a promoter….well, not really a ‘falling out’, just we don’t really like him ….

LBC. : Did you have musical training before that/Did you attend music classes?
Richard [drums] : I didn’t really play an instrument at the time. One day I told Hugo ’cause he was starting a band, about that I could play drums. But I didn’t really play at the time. So I said I’ll learn and then basically just went from there and I had a couple of lessons for about a month, two months, three…. Then, I’ll make the lessons worked in practical. In about a week’s time all the band was set up.
Hugo [guitar] : Alan studied music for G.C.S.E. at school, and …I don’t think we could really play music properly. We play basic music. I could not play guitar as such but I know what sounds good with other things: I rely more on drums and bass (Shy fx, High Contrast) and hip hop (Wu Tang Clan, Public Enemy). I think that dub and reggae as well, can give us a bit of originality even though we’re heavily pinned on that whole London scene and we are from Chichester. But I think that the percussion really gives new approach. But the guitar, I do get very ….I try to make the most different sounds I can…

LBC. : Did you have precise foreign influences?
Hugo : I really like ‘creep rock’ like one of my friends Jack has moved to Berlin. He showed me this amazing real ‘80s German pop’…I sort of wanna try and project on the guitar what you can get on a sampler but I haven’t mastered it yet. Hence why we sound…we don’t sound 100% how we want to yet. I really like hip hop but they never or rarely use guitars so for the instrumental influence… But eventually one day when we have enough money, Rick’s got the drums laid down, Alan’s got the bass, I just need to sort out my ideas and get the bloody sound I want. I want really good sounds which catch people’s attention but not in a discordant way, if that makes any sense…

LBC. : I don’t know if this is the right word but you look like quite ‘purist’ in a way. You don’t use electronic sounds, computer…
Hugo : I’ve only really recently got a computer which is only a laptop. I haven’t had a computer the whole of my life until I was 17, the age I am now, so I’ve always quite heavily believed in making music manually. You have a band who releases a single with scores based on electronic sounds then a couple of months after you got another band who releases another single which sounds the same. With our voice here and the guitar, bass and drums, we try to do something different. I constantly try to go beyond the limits of the instrument and find manually different sounds which finally could sound as electronic as a sampler sound could. It’s making my hair curl trying to find it. I still haven’t found it yet but I want to try and find it playing it manually rather than just pressing a button… We’re still only 17 so we’ve still got a long time to find it…The more we’ll try and experiment, the more we find the ideal sound.

LBC. : What do you mean by ‘ideal sound’? Is that linked with a certain originality?
Disconcerts : I want to make original sounds of instruments but not so original that you can’t like. Too ‘avant’ garde or something. I want to make a really original pop song. We can make pop songs but they are not 100% original at the moment. We’re trying to master our craft and make it what could be considered a bit more original.

LBC. : On the myspace, you define yourselves as post-punk, minimalist and pop. One of them precisely, or all?
Hugo : I don’t know, I would say minimal just because we ARE minimal. We’re a three piece, we rely very heavily on percussion to sort of hold it together. And probably because we don’t have enough money to buy that equipment so you have to try and sound through your own means.
Well, and I would say post-punk… I do like things they call post-punk. Post-punk bands weren’t names tagging themselves as post-punk really, they tried doing more experimental music and because it was working, class white people doing it, they sort of just nailed it onto the wall saying it was post-punk and then that was the end of it.
Post-punk’s sort of a dead-end genre anyway ‘cause everyone says they are when they use a bit of flange or something on their guitar. But really post-punk was trying to project white people doing a different sort of music but people try and compress it too much into something else and I can’t really explain what it is, but it’s just something poppy about post-punk and it’s experimental but…when someone says you’re a post-punk band it almost irritates me even though that’s what we have put upon our headlines for our myspace. As soon as one band says they’re post-punk, another band says the same. They’re trying to press them together, to sound similar when we don’t have any sort of influence in comparison between them. We would like to do something different, not mainly post punk in these terms but a POP record.
In fact to end the question, you can’t categorise …someone else can put someone in a category but the people who are making it can’t ever decide ‘cause every week they start listening to something else, but it almost just comes out of you and you don’t even realise how it’s coming out so it’s impossible really to describe your music. So I thought using the three words ‘pop’, ‘post-punk’ and ‘minimalism’ was just the best words because I really like what they call post-punk if you look at the Fall, Public Image, Gareth Jones. I love pop music because a lot of post-punk IS pop music, real big pop music.
It’s an impossible question to answer when you’re trying to describe what you make when you can’t even remember what you make really. You go like ‘How did I even come up with that?’. You’re almost frustrated up with yourself that you came up with that idea that you can never come up with again because you’ve used it and you don’t even know why you used that idea….

LBC. : Then is there a particular process for you to make a song?
Rick : We normally just jam out the song….
Hugo : We all believe sort of that whatever environment you practise in is the environment you play live in. Richard has this tiny little summer house where you squeeze in wires everywhere. We all face the drums and we don’t really speak to each other, just almost bounces off each other so that’s why when Alan sings into the mic he sort of sings sideways so he can look at Rick and I sing sort of so I can see Rick over my shoulder. The rhythm comes from Rick’s drums. The drums and bass hold it together and I almost don’t really need to be there, I’m almost like a living sampler.
Well, for the process…you don’t even realise ’cause all I do writing lyrics is I just read lots of books and underline words I like and write them down and then scramble them around. I put about seven different books into one song. I just like words which sound nice together. It is not like bands who try and say ‘I just wanna show people what the reality of the world is .’ Do people really want what the reality of the world is? You’re supposed to try and escape it. You want escapism.
Richard : Yes, when you listen to music, you listen to it because you want to escape reality, so I think that’s the reason we write our songs the way we do.
Hugo : All it is profound nonsense. Anyone can put anything into it, but to us it means ‘fuck all’ really. People go ‘Is that what it’s about? It’s about J.G. Ballard with Crash isn’t it?’. Anyway, words could just fit together nicely, not words which clash. In musical terms, discords are alright, but discords in words I really hate, when they don’t flow together. I suppose that’s where our whole poppy aspect comes in.

LBC. : Poppy and straight to the point… Why did you choose Disconcerts as a band’s name?
Disconcerts : Well, we wanted to form a band that we could name and we looked in a thesaurus I’ve got at home and the first word I saw….I can’t even remember what it said, it just said disconcerts and I underlined it, and that was the end of it, but now a lot of people say our music is disconcerting so I suppose it does relate to the music, our name and all. We had so many ideas for a name for the band… Disconcerts just sounded simple and complicated enough at the same time. It just fitted and I suppose almost the name influenced the music rather than the music influencing the name; and now we’re called Disconcerts. We haven’t mastered it yet but we know what sound we want in our head for Disconcerts.

LBC. : Disconcert stays a strong word… Is your music really disconcerting up to make people leave during the gig or make them hating it?
Disconcerts : If people left our gig I’d really be heartbroken. I hate bands who say ‘We want to make it as weird as possible so people don’t like it but the critics love it ‘. I don’t want that, I want everyone to appreciate and love what we do. As arrogant as it sounds….I know it’s impossible to achieve but it’s what I really want to achieve. We try to make music that’s challenging but at the same time people aren’t going to be ‘oh that’s a load of rubbish, they’re just making a load of noise’. Challenging stuff that people still listen to and will actually enjoy.
I suppose the thing which sums up our name is that we bring the most commercial parts of music people like and draw it into one: the drum and bass drums so that people who are like ‘I like drum and bass so I like that’; really dubby low bass and then the people who like dub step or reggae are like ‘I like that ‘cause you’ve got big bass’ and then same for people who do like the sort of real twangy, scratchy ‘80s style guitar’. Somehow it’s to make a combination and then, don’t even think about the singing and so son, just make and play the sound.

LBC. : How were the sales for your single release (March 09)?
Hugo : I was really proud of it : the only ones we’ve got left are the ones which we have here, which is – as far as I know – twelve left. Is it?
Richard : About another 12 left, yes, I think they’re hopping to have more in around a few shops but …
Hugo : We’re recording again on the seventh….

LBC. : Are you excited about recording again?
Hugo : It’s really a case of boredom. It’s not a matter of ‘Oh we’ve sort of sold out, we must record again’. It’s just ‘I’m bored of the songs and I don’t want people to get bored of them so I want people to hear our new songs I like’.

LBC. : You are saying ‘to be bored of some songs’ . What is to ‘get rid of it’ and feel again refreshed? Is that a sort of going from one kind of music and approach to one another all the time? And/or to mix?
Richard : To progress and change is obviously important. I don’t want to be that band where people hear a new song of ours and go ‘oh that’s just another Disconcerts song’. I’d rather them listen to it and be like ‘oh I wouldn’t have thought that’s Disconcerts’. Not a completely different band, it’s just nice to hear a change every now and then.

LBC. : And how about then the sounds that remain in the past? I mean, a best album is the one that people will listen over the time, again and again, without any distinction of context really. So after making these refreshing and disconcerting songs, how about the rest?
Hugo : Like most bands, everyone wants to be the footprint, in intellectual steps. There’s no point denying it – the only reason you want to form a band is because in twenty years time we want people to pick up a newspaper and see a review of a new release you didn’t even know about like ‘Aaah, I remember doing that’ and then people just saying he was really ahead of his time and it’s hard to try and do that. But it happens to a lot of bands.

LBC. : Or it doesn’t…really…depends on the point of view…
Hugo : You can’t really judge that really, but once you put something out there, people – kids always living with their parents, their auntie and grandmas, they are going to pick stuff, they’ll be rummaging round and then they’ll see a record like ‘Ooh what’s this?’ and they’ll put it on and maybe they’ll like it and maybe they wont.

LBC. : That’s partly the reason why we discover old bands, famous or unknown…
Hugo : Yeah exactly it’s like word of mouth. People say word of mouth doesn’t work but it works in a very mysterious way which takes fucking ages to work but it happens eventually through time like Velvet Underground for example. And it would be pretending to say that we don’t need to be interviewed and have gigs and so to be discovered and be interviewed again and do more gigs and so on…

LBC. : What are your projects? Keep releasing and become a rock star as they
say?
Hugo: Hopefully. Every band wants to. Every band carries an ego with them, there’s no point denying it.
Richard: I just want people to respect us, that’s one thing I want, people to respect us as a band. I don’t mind where it goes….
Hugo: You want to be respected. You don’t mind about money so much, you just want people to know you. Know what you’re doing and know what you’re trying to do. And I think that’s why our songs are so short, ‘cause there’s no point flapping about saying ‘We wanna do that one no no no no no in fact we’re gonna do that’, we just wanna show what we do, sound straight line.

LBC. : Did you want to ask some questions I didn’t ask?
Hugo : The questions have been very good, especially as you caught me in quite a giggly mood so I got quite into it. Is that done then?

LBC. : I think so, yes. Thank you for your time.

Interview done the 4th May 2009 by Berthe Vroom at The Queen of Hoxton, London, GB.

• MySpace
• Clip Human Figure In Motion
• Crash est un roman d’anticipation de 1973, écrit par l’écrivain britannique J. G. Ballard